The Department of Education has told House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
that the City College of San Francisco can have more time to fix its
problems and avoid closure.

Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

The Department of Education has told House Minority Leader ...

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Claudeen Narnac walks down the steps in front of a City College of San Francisco sign which may lose its accreditation effective on July 31, 2014 in San Francisco.

Photo: Ian C. Bates, The Chronicle

Claudeen Narnac walks down the steps in front of a City College of...

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First year student Westly Huang sits and waits for his Accelerated English class to begin at San Francisco City College in San Francisco, CA Wednesday September 11, 2013.

Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

First year student Westly Huang sits and waits for his Accelerated...

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People wait under the Ocean Avenue/CCSF Pedestrian Bridge on Ocean Avenue for inbound KT-Ingleside/Third Street trains on December 11, 2013 near City College of San Francisco in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Pete Kiehart, The Chronicle

People wait under the Ocean Avenue/CCSF Pedestrian Bridge on Ocean...

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Timur Nenaydokh, City College of San Francisco, student, poses for a portrait on campus on Wednesday, January 29, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. Nenaydokh wears a backpack he exchanged for his with a member of the Royal Air Force while serving with the Marines in Afghanistan.

City College of San Francisco student Wendy Liu (left) checks over classwork during an Introductory Statistics class (Econ 5) with Professor David Pieper (right) at CCSF on Tuesday, February 18, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

City College of San Francisco student Wendy Liu (left) checks over...

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City College of San Francisco student Norman Nesby Jr. tears a sheet of paper to wrap some meat in as he works at his internship at The Local Butcher Shop on Thursday, February 20, 2014 in Berkeley, Calif.

In its clearest communication yet, the U.S. Department of Education has told House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi that the commission seeking to revoke accreditation from City College of San Francisco can extend that looming deadline to give the school more time to fix its problems and avoid closure.

The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges "has the authority to reconsider or rescind its termination decision so as to provide the institution with additional time to come into compliance within the two-year time frame, if such period has not run out, or to provide an extension for good cause," Lynn Mahaffie, a senior accrediting director with the Education Department, wrote Pelosi on Monday in response to questions from the congresswoman.

That two-year time frame ends on July 31, despite a legal injunction that bars the commission from revoking accreditation until a trial in October determines whether the commission acted properly when it first evaluated City College in 2012.

The letter to Pelosi confirms what a spokeswoman for U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told The Chronicle last week: that the commission can extend its deadline.

"This letter from the Department of Education responding to my inquiry proves that the (commission) retains the flexibility to grant CCSF an extension for good cause, despite their previous claims to the contrary," Pelosi said in a statement.

"For the (commission) to refuse to allow good-cause extension - even after this clarification from the Department of Education, even after all the monumental progress City College has made along its Roadmap to Success - would be destructive, irresponsible, and could be viewed as a political act.

"For the livelihood of the students, the community, and the state, the (commission) must send in a new evaluation team with a fresh set of eyes and allow a good-cause extension of accreditation."

Request of commission

Also on Tuesday, the chairman of the California Community Colleges Board of Governors, Manuel Baca, sent a letter to Sherrill Amador, the commission's chairwoman, asking the commission to rescind its decision to revoke City College's accreditation and saying the state board would not have cooperated with the commission in its concerns about City College if it had been told there was no hope to save the vast and important school.

Last summer, the Board of Governors replaced City College's elected Board of Trustees with a single special trustee.

"We did so with the strong encouragement of (the commission) and with the commission's assurances that there was a pathway to restoration of the accreditation of the college," Baca wrote. "We would never have undertaken the job if there were no chance of fully restoring accreditation."

Baca's letter reflects the increasing anxiety of thousands of City College students and employees, as well as state officials and politicians from Pelosi to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee about the fate of the college of 80,000 students, the largest public school in California, because the commission appears to be unwilling to help the college avoid losing accreditation. Without it, City College would lose state funding and close.

Accreditation critical

The commission has said it would prefer that City College lose accreditation and become a candidate for future accreditation. Without that seal of approval, however, credits earned at City College would not be transferrable to universities, and federal financial aid could be jeopardized. The state would also have to pass a special law to permit funding for an unaccredited City College.

City College officials have said they will not voluntarily give up accreditation, and advocates for the school have called on the commission to adopt a policy at its next meeting, June 4-6, to extend the current revocation deadline.

But during a visit to The Chronicle last week, accrediting commission President Barbara Beno, Chairwoman Amador and Vice Chairman Steven Kinsella insisted that the Department of Education does not allow it to extend the deadline.

At the same time, Amador said that if the Education Department removed all doubt about the commission's authority to extend the deadline, "we'd look at it. We're reasonable people."

The commission's spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment on the letter to Pelosi.

In it, Mahaffie explained that the commission can adopt a policy allowing it to extend the deadline in response to "an improvement in institutional performance."

Lack of oversight

In 2012, the commission determined that City College had extremely poor financial controls, a tangled governance structure and a lack of educational oversight to such an extent that college officials hadn't known what courses to offer or whether students were meeting learning objectives.

So bad was the situation that 125 people had access to the payroll, and the college lost millions of dollars by failing to charge registration fees from students.

Commission leaders said last week that they knew of no evidence of improvement,but they acknowledged they hadn't checked since spring 2013, when their team last visited City College.